There have been a few things I’ve wanted to comment on over the weekend, but haven’t. All have coincidentally been inter-related, which has made it all the more interesting, but all the same, I’ve had a throbber of a headache the last couple of days.

First cab of the rank is the issue of definitions surrounding the word “evolution”.

“Pelagian7″, in response to an ongoing discussion about Darwinian evolution and ethics, writes…

“I’m started to get the feeling that we are on the same thought process but semantics and terms are preventing some of our understanding.”

(Pelagian7, 2009)

It’s a fair enough statement. I defined my use of some terms in the post in question (“ad hoc“, “altruism” and “egoism”), but I didn’t define my use of the terms “evolution”, “natural selection” and so on. Also, given that when I talk about “evolution”, I can sometimes oscillate between gene-centric biological, and meme-centric cultural, interchangeably, there is room for confusion.

Anyone familiar with neo-Darwinian evolution, and Dawkins’ Selfish Gene, wouldn’t have any problem getting where I’m coming from (I’d hope). But I guess that without declaring my terms, I’m limiting my audience.

So at some point I guess I’ll have to nail my colours to the mast and write a post on my use of these terms. And given the widespread abuse of evolutionary terminology, I guess it wouldn’t be as trivial an exercise as it may seem.

And while on the topic, I’ll ask a couple of questions put to me.

“If some in a species begin birthing many times more than others because they have the cabability, does that not produce resource hardship on the others of the species? Doesn’t hardship then eliminate those who produce less offspring?”

(Pelagian7, 2009)

No, and no. People who use birth control and who have a lowered reproduction rate due to female emancipation and education, tend to do pretty well for themselves as far as quality of life is concerned, and more so in terms of resource allocation. As a species, there isn’t an extinction, even if these types of people never have children, because there are others of their species carrying much the same genes.

Memetically speaking, there may be a kind of tendency towards a cultural extinction if ideas aren’t passed along, said ideas being caught up in some kind of class-reservoir. But even then, this isn’t necessarily a function of suffering, nor even involve suffering. Not all cultural memes that exist amongst the privileged are to the benefit of their hosts, nor are they missed when they’re gone (reality TV anyone?)

At any rate, I think in discussion of evolution, as opposed to any ethical discussion it may inform, the use of extremely subjective terms such as “hardship”, is risky. At least, for those not familiar with the way biologists, ethologists and the like, may use evolutionary terminology. When Dawkins calls something “selfish” or “altruistic”, he’s talking about an empirically observable behaviour, not a psychological disposition. Put in his words…

“When biologists talk about ‘selfishness or ‘altruism’ we are emphatically not talking about emotional nature, whether of human beings, other animals, or genes. We do not even mean the words in a metaphorical sense. We define altruism and selfishness in purely behaviouristic ways: ‘An entity… is said to be altruistic if it behaves in such a way as to increase another such entity’s welfare at the expense of its own… It follows from such a behaviouristic definition of altruism and selfishness that ‘calculation’, whether long-term or not, is irrelevant, as is ‘emotional nature’. I assume that an oak tree has no emotions and cannot calculate, yet I might describe an oak tree as altruistic if it grew fewer leaves than its physiological optimum, thereby sparing neighbouring saplings harmful overshadowing.”

(Richard Dawkins, In Defense of Selfish Genes, ‘Philosophy’,1981)

Similarly, I don’t think it right to automatically equate negative selective pressures – constraints upon genes to perpetuate themselves – with hardship. Aside from introducing an unnecessary term into the evolutionary language, and from not equating perfectly (see birth control), it’s risky language open to misinterpretation. Best to call “negative selective pressures”, “negative selective pressures” and be done with it, saving reference to suffering for ethical discussion, if such suffering occurs.

And on that note, I’ll segue to the next topic.

Science and Ethics

I’ve said before, that science can only, and should, inform ethics. That it can’t dictate ethics. It’s always a bit gratifying to have someone with academic stature say the same thing.

Letting science inform morality (4:43)

Back when I was studying Ethics, Education and Critical Inquiry, I was introduced to an acronym: CURF. It stood for…

• Circumstances
• Utilitarian Principle
• Reasoning
• Facts

(Knight & Collins, 2000)

Basically, these were the principles by which a community of ethical inquiry would operate. The idea was geared towards the classroom (either Primary or High School), but was at least formulated with lifelong learning, and hence a life lived with ethical curiosity, in mind.

As I was studying under a science degree at the time, it was immediately obvious that “Facts”, or “Getting the consequences “straight”", as the course literature put it, would in many cases be best served by science. Neither, supernaturalism, ideology nor material speculation are quite up to the task of making predictions when science is able. The consequences of medical procedures upon a patient come to mind – a shaman is no match for a doctor in seeing where options leads (even paths through the shaman’s own domain where science hasn’t taken a look, entails a lot of wild speculation).

Broaden this to human nature, where science is still making early steps in spite of taboo, and you have the possibility that the idea of evolution, and evolutionary knowledge, could help us make predictions for human consequences. Even if only tentatively. (That socio-biologists and evolutionary psychologists have taken such caution, while ideology has tended to make bold assertion about human nature, is to the credit of the evolutionary perspective.)

In pursuit of this kind of thought, I’ve got Singer’s A Darwinian Left on order at Dymocks. Although I’m already expecting to have a few points of difference from the author.

Singer

Aside from the fact that I probably take a more conservative estimation of the point at which to assume a life-form is capable of suffering from their death, I suspect my logic to be the same. It the points of fact where I anticipate divergence.

Daniel Dennett’s more recent Freedom Evolves, reports that in modelling of evolutionary game theory, when accounting for variables such as location, previously excluded due to issues of computational power, altruism (the behaviour) fared better than previously thought. Personally, I suspect that the evolutionary outlook of human nature, as it progresses will continue to throw up surprises like this, more so as it makes its transition from corrigible philosophy to material science.

At a guess, I suspect human nature involves a capacity for kindness that has been previously discounted. Hence, the way evolution informs ethics, if this were true, would be different – especially as Singer dwells on the obstacles our selfish nature pose to ethical venture, not privy to more recent thought at the time of publishing.

More broadly than this, I expect that I’ll be looking into the evolution of culture as possibly informing ethical decision-making. Whereas I suspect that Singer hasn’t looked into this side of things as much as Dennett has. Imagine A Darwinian Left grafted on top of Breaking The Spell, and maybe you can see where I’m going with this (loosely speaking – at the very least I’m not restricting myself to the evolution of religion, but other cultural institutions as well).

Whatever happens, I’m sure I’ll be surprised in one way or another, which is always nice.

Church and Lies

Especially considering that this kind of stuff doesn’t surprise me anymore. Thanks again to Matt Kovach, for finding this little gem. (How do you find these articles, Matt?)

Responding to a New York atheist ad that essentially argues that atheists can and are good people as well, with the cheeky question “are you?” at the end, New York Dominican friar, Gabriel Gillen, comes out with this disingenuous pap.

“If the ad’s claim is true, that an atheist is capable of the same type of heroism as, let’s say, Wesley Autrey – the construction worker with two small children who risked his life to save a stranger who had fallen onto the subway tracks – I would not only agree with this assertion but point to a concrete example from the well-known atheist Peter Singer. When his own mother lay helpless with Alzheimer’s disease, he broke all of his own rules, thus throwing away his credibility as a utilitarian philosopher onto the tracks: He came to her rescue.”

(Gabriel Gillen, 2009)

Because there are no atheists in foxholes for Gillen to come up with an equivalent to Wesley Autrey? But to compound Gillen’s bad humour in bad faith, it gets worse. Apparently Gillen’s education to become a Dominican friar didn’t include the observation that irony doesn’t flow from imaginary contradiction.

Despite what Gillen (wrongly) tells us, Peter Singer’s approach to the disabled is that first, it depends on the disability and how it detracts from quality of life compared to the loss brought about through euthanasia. Second, Singer’s position is that this is a decision for the family. And you know what? Singer has family and they decided they didn’t want euthanasia. There isn’t anything in Singer’s logic that is contradicted by the turn of events surrounding his mother’s unfortunate situation.

I wish I could chalk this opportunism up to his past as a Wall Street stock broker, but Gillen and his religious absolutist ilk, have been pushing this sad, mendacious canard for over ten years now. That the suffering in the Singer’s personal lives could be used as a political football like this, especially considering there isn’t actually a genuine ethical argument to made from it, tells us a lot about the psychology of the Gillen’s of the world.

Don’t think that Gillen is unwilling to go further in his sadistic misanthropy. A pass by Godwin’s law comes next.

“History has shown that a radically rationalist culture becomes radically irrational if it is detached from God. The atheistic ideologies of Nazism and Communism did not produce earthly paradises, but only tragic regimes of terror that trampled human dignity and freedom.”

(Gabriel Gillen, 2009)

Considering that nobody is claiming that the Godless are automatically saints (which Gillen claims is the case for the billboard campaign), that atheists have done bad things (or that the religious have done bad things) is uncontroversial. However, there were problems in Communist Russia which had nothing to do with Godlessness, and Nazism wasn’t a godless ideology anyway. Chalk another one up for The Big Lie – why do so many old-school Catholic opinionists and “academics” repeat pap which is known to be false?

At any rate, Gillen hasn’t shown a causal link between “radically rationalist” and “radically irrational” (much less defined the terms). Moreover, there are godless societies around now that are doing quite well, breaking any notion of a logical necessity between godlessness and “tragic regimes of terror”.

“This is why Pope Benedict reverses the axiom and says: “Even those who are unable to accept God should in any case seek to live and direct their lives as if God exists. This is the same advice that Renée Pascal had given to his nonbelieving friends; it is the advice that we would like to give today as well to our friends who do not believe.”"

(Gabriel Gillen, 2009)

Amazing is Gillen’s hypocrisy. Fresh from bleating that Singer didn’t live up to his ethics, and warning that atheism leads to tyranny and terror, Gillen gives us advice on how to steer clear of this terror from an anti-Semite who once joined the Hitler youth!

And Pascal’s non-argument (nee Pascal’s Roulette, nee Pascal’s Wager), please. When you add all the gods into the wager, the Catholic God, as with all the rest, becomes a bad bet. At least earnest godlessness has the virtue of honesty, which is more than can be said for Pascal’s position – just act like you believe!

Oh well, at least with my intended future reading into ethics, I’ll get a break from this kind of silliness. So much for the Dominican intellectual tradition!

~ Bruce

… No more pracs. No more tutes. No more workshops. No more lectures. No more assignments.

Would it be too soon to update the “About the author” section with details of my B. Sc. when I get my final grade in, or should I wait until the formality of getting my parchment?

And on that note, I’ll also point out that I really don’t like the idea of collecting a parchment with a robe and silly hat on. It offends my sensibilities (I’d say “sartorial sense” if I had any.)

~ Bruce

In taking Greg Craven to task over a rather paranoid, bare assertion and straw man laden snit against those terrible new atheists, which given the material, is fair enough, thanks to his own rhetoric, winds up scoring an own goal as well.

“The neo-atheists – Dawkins, Hitchens and others – are an annoying bunch, taking the most literal version of monotheism, and then guffawingly mocking it (’oh a whale, really’) in a tone not unlike the baby in the Family Guy.”

(Guy Rundle, 2009)

Firstly, the use of the whole “neo-atheist” tag, with the recent (and perhaps unfortunate) exception of Victor Stenger, isn’t readily used by the “neo-atheists” themselves. The phrase is pretty much the province of people who whine that there is an atheist conspiracy to rob people of their religious rights, which is baloney. It’s lingo right up there with the terminology of birther, Obama is a secret Muslim-Socialist and FEMA death camp conspiracy theories. A label to facilitate outgroup hostilities.

Rundle’s take on things is also pretty inaccurate. At least nor even remotely for anything outside Hitchens’ God is Not Great, and even then it’s a pretty poor approximation.

I’ll summarise the “neo-atheist” books so that you can see why I don’t think Rundle’s approximation stacks up.

The End of Faith (and Letter To a Christian Nation), by Sam Harris – First of all, Harris makes a clear and explicit distinction between fundamentalist literal monotheism, and more moderate religion, then proceeds to tackle the fundamentalist variety. Making such a clean distinction, there is no room for reasonable confusion between the two and thus one can’t possibly make the serious suggestion that he’s pretending to represent all there is to religion. He does however, in my view, while excluding the possibility of accidental equivocation and straw man arguments, ride rough-shod over the self-identification of religious people and flirts with the problems of essentialism with his talk of “true Christians” and so on. As for guffaw, there isn’t much – the tone is very serious and attempts to engage fundamentalist Christians with the utmost sincerity.

The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins – This book sets out with a very specific purpose – it’s essentially a public polemic reaching out to what one pastor referred to a “low hanging fruit” – the doubters. The point is to give affirmation to atheists, closet atheists and would-be-atheists, that being an atheist is a “splendid” thing. It deliberately and explicitly doesn’t deal with moderate religion because frankly, it doesn’t have to. It doesn’t pretend to represent or critique moderate religion. Guffawing? Sure. Although I’m not sure Stewie is the best approximation for the tone of humour, and there’s a lot more to the book than the lolz.

Breaking The Spell, by Daniel Dennett – Again, another book that while singling out less moderate religion, does so for a reason – Dennett arguing that his immediate concern entails the breaking of the taboo of analysis of more fundamentalist religious belief, and that if he had the time, he’d liked to have addressed the taboo of the analysis of moderate religion as well (which wasn’t as pressing). Guffaw is pretty much the opposite of what you will get in this book. In fact the book is about how religion came about, not a condemnation.

God: The Failed Hypothesis, by Victor Stenger – This book focuses on those more literalist Gods – specifically the ones that Stenger argues make testable predictions (which is pretty much the thrust of the book, so you can’t expect the unfalsifiable gods of moderate religion to make a show). Again, like with Dennett, it’s pretty much a guffaw free zone.

God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, by Christopher Hitchens - If there is any one of the “new atheist” books that deserves Rundle’s approximation, this is it. But to argue that guffaw is the point of the book, or even the mode of the book, is an exaggeration. The Guffaw is garnish, and there are plenty of factual religious dogmas (from East and West) worthy of said guffaw. But let’s be charitable to Rundle and assume that Hitchens stays with the more familiar monotheisms, and simply restricts himself to put-downs, rather than worthy critique with a bit of acerbic flair.

The Portable Atheist, edited by Christopher Hitchens – Most of the content is philosophical essay, of which most contributors aren’t on the “neo-atheist” black list. Gerin Oil by Dawkins has guffaw, which really takes the edge off of a rather chilling analogy. Atheists for Jesus by Dawkins is almost the exact opposite of what Rundle pretends the “neo-atheists” to be about – it’s rather flattering of moderate Christians. Betrand Russell’s An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish is scathing and Mencken’s Memorial Service makes light of dead gods in typical Mencken fashion – so much so that the guffaw in God is Not Great seems all the milder. If the “new atheists” have some kind of monopoly on laughing at religion, shouldn’t the old atheists and agnostics have been abstinent?

Quantum Gods, by Victor Stenger – This book is dedicated to those gods of moderate religion that take refuge in obfuscations of quantum theory and cosmology, to which Stenger (a physicist) takes the proverbial blow torch. Quantum theory of mind (all that Penrose rubbish) also gets a look-in, making it a nice complimentary text to Dennett’s Freedom Evolves and Consciousness Explained. As fundies tend not to hide their god in quantum theory, the focus is in exactly the opposite direction from what Rundle suggests. Like God: The Failed Hypothesis, the book is to the point and very serious. It’s not the stuff of guffaw. Further to this, the book questions whether moderate Christianity has slipped into deism, quietly abandoning theism while keeping some of the bells and whistles – something to consider if you wonder why the “neo-atheists” aren’t paying attention to your god.

The New Atheism, by Victor Stenger – This is the “new atheist” book of 2009, and perhaps an unfortunately titled one. If there is irony, it doesn’t appear to be intentional and there isn’t any hint of deliberate appropriation of the “new atheist” term, making it look like Stenger isn’t aware of the term’s history as a pejorative. Either that or he’s holding his cards to his chest with regard to subversion, or his sense of humour is even drier than mine. The New Atheism is a review of the discussion surrounding most of the above books, and an analysis of the largely rubbish critique they have received.

These are the major “neo-atheist” publications by the major “neo-atheist” authors. Yet to me, they don’t show Rundle’s assertion (partly in jest I’m sure), holding true. Even by standards permitting oversimplification. Let’s just go with the obvious truth and state that Rundle’s perception is that of those who are annoyed by “new-atheists” (atheist and theist alike); they feel like all the “new atheists” do is guffaw at fundamentalists. It’s a load of rubbish of course. They’re just being overly precious.

Rundle entreats Craven that…

“If you’re going to oppose atheists, you better give a more sophisticated account of what belief is…”

(Guy Rundle, 2009)

I’d argue that if Rundle was going to oppose “new-atheists”, he’d better give a more sophisticated account of his objections. Perhaps for the sake of Rundle, and the theists and atheists that share his irritation, the “new-atheists” could amp-up their guffaw to something approximating that of which they are accused, just to resolve the confusion? “This is what derision looks like!”

At the very least, it’d help delineate them from the Russells, Ingersols and Menckens of old so that the level of mockery was actually something new. Indeed, then they would be speaking about religion in unflattering tones that are allowed when discussing most anything else – such as politics (I’m looking at you, Crikey!)

~ Bruce

(HT: Thanks again to Matt Kovach.)

I’d say it never gets old, but it does. Michael Ruse is back writing ‘Dawkins et al bring us into disrepute‘, stirring up those terrible “new atheists” who claim that all religion is necessarily evil and that science is the only way of knowing things! Those “New Atheists” that bring science and the philosophy of science into disrepute!

I think Ruse has been wrestling with straw men for so long he’s forgotten what a real interlocutor looks like.

Ruse asks, “Is there an atheist schism?” A schism between godless people like himself, and others like Dawkins and Dennett.

I’m going to say “no”. In order for there to be a schism, there either has to be two distinct camps in the atheist population, or at least an atheist formal structure of some kind to be split in the first place. The latter doesn’t exist – there was no formal alliance between those dubbed the new atheists – no plot to release their books in a coordinated fashion and draw a line between their like and the rest of the godless. The former is illusory, whatever anyone tells you. Atheists still differ on a number of issues, even quite wildly within the “new atheists”.

There was never enough unity of thought for their to be a schism to begin with. Which really is what you’d expect from a bunch of free thinkers.

But that doesn’t stop Ruse from fabricating a schism.

He points to unkind things said about him by those evil “new atheists” as an example of the schism. (So a new atheist is an atheist that calls Ruse names? A bit of a narcissistic demarcation criterion?)

Dawkins compared his evolution campaigning to the appeasement practised by Neville Chamberlain, which is perhaps a bit too Godwinish, but otherwise you get the point. Jerry Coyne channelled Orwell to paint Ruse pretentious. PZ Myers called him a “gobshite”, which is perhaps going too far. Ruse, after listing these insults, tells us that he will “spare you what my fellow philosopher Dan Dennett has to say about me.”

What could have Daniel Dennett said that could have been so bad? This seems like the calculated impression Ruse wants to leave in people’s heads. But I’m totally unaware of anything Dennett has said about Ruse that could compete in terms of acerbic rhetoric, with the comments attributed to Dawkins and the others. Indeed, Dennett has a reputation for being the nice guy.

Which Ruse does not. A few years back, Ruse kicked up a stink about Dennett’s Breaking The Spell, running a line about how it was all scientism, evolutionism, reductionism, blah, blah, blah and all the rest of the usual strawman arguments. Further to that though, Ruse started a bit of a grudge with Dennett, sending him some emails with rather colourful language. Then when thinking he had the upper hand (the emails were chock full of some pretty audacious  self-indulgence), without permission he passed on the exchange to William Dembski of the Discovery Institute, and they’ve been open to the public ever since.

If you are interested in the exchange, it can be found here. Aside from rhetorically turning Ruse’s cleaner words back on him, Dennett’s harshest comment seemed to be the calculated “I doubt that you mean all the things you say here. Think it over.” Which frankly, is pretty mild. Especially when compared to Ruse’s antics in the exchange – indeed, even PZ Myers’ “gobshite” is made to look considerably more mellow!

If there is an example of Dennett acting up like this, I’ve never seen it and it would seem out of character.

Somehow, I think trash-talk is a pretty poor choice of demarcation criterion for Ruse to use, given his own hyperbole.

So then he moves onto the strawman arguments.

“First, non-believer though I may be, I do not think (as do the new atheists) that all religion is necessarily evil and corrupting.”

(Michael Ruse, 2009)

Oddly enough, Dawkins doesn’t believe think this either, which if you read Atheists for Jesus, or any of a number of other his essays, is obvious. Indeed, one need only look to the example of the Muslim taxi driver in God is Not Great and you can see that Hitchens doesn’t think that all religion is necessarily evil and corrupting. To characterise Dennett like this, in light of what he said in Breaking The Spell, is a particularly grotesque distortion. For one, Dennett didn’t say anything of the sort, and moreover, he was very tentative about what he did say.

Ruse is distancing himself from a caricature. And in taking himself so seriously, makes a caricature out of himself.

“Second, unlike the new atheists, I take scholarship seriously. I have written that The God Delusion made me ashamed to be an atheist and I meant it. Trying to understand how God could need no cause, Christians claim that God exists necessarily. I have taken the effort to try to understand what that means. Dawkins and company are ignorant of such claims and positively contemptuous of those who even try to understand them, let alone believe them. Thus, like a first-year undergraduate, he can happily go around asking loudly, “What caused God?” as though he had made some momentous philosophical discovery.”

(Michael Ruse, 2009)

Well, Ruse’s history of deploying the strawman completely puts the lie to the claim that he takes his scholarship seriously. Let’s not be fooled by this, even if Ruse has fooled himself.

And if Ruse has taken the effort to try to understand what it means, that God exists necessarily, why doesn’t he tell us what it means? Why not demonstrate this scholarship, instead of just telling us how good he thinks he is? Coyne was right to call him out on being pretentious.

But it gets sillier.

“Dawkins was indignant when, on the grounds that inanimate objects cannot have emotions, philosophers like Mary Midgley criticised his metaphorical notion of a selfish gene. Sauce for the biological goose is sauce for the atheist gander. There are a lot of very bright and well informed Christian theologians. We atheists should demand no less.”

(Michael Ruse, 2009)

For a start, Mary Midgley did criticise The Selfish Gene, and she did so in the most disingenuous fashion, alleging that Dawkins was setting up the grounds for philosophic egoism, and trying to make her argument through multiple distortions of the content. To quote Dawkins in the end notes of The Selfish Gene…

“This strategic way of talking about an animal or plant, or a gene, as if it were consciously working out how best to increase its success… has become commonplace among working biologists. It is a language of convenience which is harmless unless it happens to fall into the hands of those ill-equipped to understand it. Or over-equipped to misunderstand it?”

(Richard Dawkins, ‘The Selfish Gene’, 30th Anniversary Edition, pg. 278, 2006)

Midgley’s utterly ludicrous distortion of Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene can be read here. If you get the gist of Dawkins’ book, it should be easy to grapple with where Midgley has gone badly wrong. If not, you can read Dawkins response here, where he addresses several specific distortions point by point. Just remember, Ruse is throwing in his lot with Midgley and presents her as “a bright and well informed Christian.” If I were a Christian, I’d be offended, both by the specious flattery and the association with Midgley’s particularly unscholarly distortions.

(If you want things simplified on Midgley on Dawkins, consider that she has accused Dawkins – who has argued against social Darwinism on several occasions, has called paying tax in support of the welfare state a moral act, and who has never voted conservative – of ideological Thatcherite competition worship.)

Finally, Ruse gets to the point of who Dawkins brings us all into disrepute with.

“Fourth and finally, I live in the American South, surrounded by ardent Christians. I want evolution taught in the schools and I can think of no way better designed to make that impossible than to spout on about religion, from ignorance and with contempt. … If, as the new atheists think, Darwinian evolutionary biology is incompatible with Christianity, then will they give me a good argument as to why the science should be taught in schools if it implies the falsity of religion?”

(Michael Ruse, 2009)

Firstly, that bit about contempt I think is a bit of an over-exaggeration, at least in as far as the inference is that there is undeserved contempt. When contempt has been shown, it’s been directed at specific examples – the antics of the Haggards, the Hagees, the Liberty and Pat Robertson Universities and so on. All quite deserving of contempt. There isn’t a contempt for the general Christian population. That’s just baloney.

As for Darwinian evolutionary biology being incompatible with Christianity, let’s get a few things straight.

• There is a difference between saying that the ideas of Christianity and the idea of Darwinian evolution are incompatible, and saying the Christian faith and the idea of Darwinian evolution are incompatible. The former is argued by Coyne, Dawkins and Myers at least, but none of them argue the latter. To Dawkins et al, the Christian faith is a state of mind which doesn’t necessarily exclude Christians from believing things that are incompatible with Christian ideas. Dawkins has said as much repeatedly, on the tour for his current book and previously in The God Delusion when talking about Ken Miller. Myers and Coyne recently went over the same points in relation to the beliefs of Francis Collins after the announcement of his appointment to the NIH.
• There are plenty of ideas taught in secular science that conflict with religious ideas. If Ruse is setting this as a standard to have secular science chucked out of classrooms, then he’s the one who’s guilty of giving support to the anti-science crowd. Geology contradicts Young Earth Creationism. Geometry contradicts a literal parsing of The Old Testament where Pi is described incorrectly. Are we going to hold back teachers from discussing the archaeology of the ancient Middle East, just to satisfy some religious narratives? Can we talk about menstruation in biological terms, if we don’t want to contradict notions of original sin? There is already contradiction!
• The question of evolution being kicked from the classroom is only one side of the story – the introduction of creationism, indeed, the introduction alongside evolution, is frankly a larger issue in the debate, and the potential hostility to religion of evolution isn’t relevant to the way the establishment clause works in regard to this.
• Finally, why would we not want to bring to debate on the civics of teaching evolution in public schools, the notion that it is incompatible with religion, if indeed it is? It’s an important civic debate and such obfuscation is tantamount to withholding evidence – being flatly dishonest and ultimately impractical in that it only delays the inevitable.

Apparently not having actually made his final point, and needing to needle a little more, what would be better to finish off with that an unscholarly summation of The God Delusion.

“In the God Delusion, we have a message as simplistic as in The Genesis Flood. This too will solve all of your problems. Peace and prosperity await you in this world, if not the next.

Forgive me if I don’t sign on.”

(Michael Ruse, 2009)

Of course, anyone who has actually read The God Delusion without such blinkers, knows that it makes no such claim as to “solve all of your problems.” Indeed, it only pretends to solve a very few, specific maladies. Like Dennett, I really doubt that Ruse believes what he says.

But then, perhaps Ruse, in one honest phrase in his exchange with Dennett, explains the apparent contradiction between Ruse’s professed respect for scholarship, and his lack of it.

“I have no reputation to preserve, and frankly can say and do whatever the f**k I want to without sinking further.”

(Michael Ruse, 2006)

Says a lot really, doesn’t it?

Kind of makes the assertion that Dawkins et al are the ones bringing us all into disrepute look a bit silly, really.

~ Bruce

(HT: Mattincinci for the heads up on Ruse’s Guardian article.)

Rachel Hills has a fine article over at New Matilda, criticising the way paedophilia is talked about in the media. Specifically, that there is a kind of lynch mob mentality, where even the most mildly dissenting view is enough to “run the risk of implicating yourself.”

And by mildly dissenting, I mean along the lines of “perhaps we shouldn’t hang them in a gibbet.”

If anyone makes a cursory investigation into the way morals evolve within a community, there are themes common from culture to culture. A necessary means of protecting the people who engage in altruistic (kin-selection) behaviours is the have everyone follow the rules, and to have means to sniff out the fakes from the loyal contributing members. Sadly, the means by which this is done are hardly perfect, nor are the values that are sought to be protected, beyond criticism.

The value of egalitarianism, an apparent soft target for freeloaders, is protected at least statistically by the process of othering – to identify outsiders to be denied said egalitarianism on the grounds that they don’t think like us. Even if they do think like us. This is how the memes of things like outgroup animosity (e.g. atheists can’t be good people!) counter-intuitively make it into the same memeplex as altruistic values – there is enough altruism to benefit the community (and the memes) with enough restriction to at least statistically prevent the altruism becoming a liability.

It shouldn’t need to be said that disobedience is a regular grounds for being othered and then ground into the dirt. It doesn’t need to be skin colour, or for being over the other side of the mountain.

Which is basically what happens when you dare to consider that a calm, rational analysis of paedophiles (and to varying extents, murders and rapists and so on). By criticising the meme that paedophiles should be brutalised, you threaten the survivability of that meme and the protective memeplex that surrounds it comes crashing down on your head.

These memes, to my eye seem to accrete around basic human instincts like a pearl around a foreign body. The genetic predisposition to kill, or at least defend from, that which could threaten your children being a pretty strong and pervasive urge, only the most convoluted and adapted memeplexes could work explicitly to the contrary (such as some found in religion where children are ritually abused.)

It’s much easier for a simple meme to facilitate these protective instincts – to borrow from the lexicon of Daniel Dennett, the evolutionary R&D required for such memes is less.

And I think that’s what we’re facing. A heap of kill-the-paedo memes, and a protective memeplex that punishes dissent.

All in all, I think then that the people peddling these memes are a bunch of sissies. Not so much afraid of paedophiles and not necessarily afraid of the people dissenting, but afraid, and geared to be afraid of, anything that makes them look at their own motivations with a critical eye.

The fanciful narrative dressing chauvinism up as civilised, I think is part of the meme.

They don’t want the book thrown at the paedophiles because of some thought out rationale (made rather obvious by the fact that there isn’t a thought out rationale on the table). They want to see the book thrown at the paedophile because they just want to get them.

Admitting this would shine too much light onto the policy, but before it gets that far, the memeplex uses the wannabe vigilante’s ego as shielding. “I’m not baying for blood! I’m civilised!”

The memeplex is exploiting commonplace akrasia. That the civilised human can’t also be a growling animal under the hood.

Well they can. I know this because a damn good part of me wants to kill paedophiles as well. And I don’t mean kill in the name of some convoluted, contrived moral stance. That would be akrasia. I mean that a part of me just wants to kill them and that’s that. Paedophiles creep the hell out of me – it’s probably one of the few hates I’ve yet to purge from my mind.

Maybe having a somewhat rough upbringing makes this part of human nature more obvious to me than for some of the safe suburbanites. It never ceases to bring a grin when some git who has never used force to subdue another human being tells me that I need to stop being all touchy feely. I suspect it sounds to them like a tough way to demand that I don’t make them feel uncomfortable through criticism – which seems a bit too touchy feely to me.

I think the first thing we need to get over if the taboo preventing rational discussion is to be broken, is to address and debunk this milquetoast vigilantism that has chauvinists talking tough from the safety of their protected little lives. Too afraid to venture a rational angle after admitting they don’t have one and afraid of making themselves vulnerable by admitting what they’ve got under the hood.

It probably needs to be done for the whole law ‘n’ order thing. You can have the urge to smack child molesters around and have rational debate, but you can’t honestly dress up an such an urge in a memeplex and call it reasoned.

~ Bruce

First of all, some clarification on the way I’ll be using three terms.

• By ad hoc, I mean the addition of extraneous elements to a theory or justification, in order to rescue it from perceived failure in the advent of observations that challenge or outright obliterate it.
• By altruism, I mean the behaviour of undertaking a venture to benefit others, with no perceived benefit to one’s self.
• By egoism, I mean the undertaking of a venture to benefit one’s self.

I’m discounting allusions to super-secret, under-the hood, self-interested motivations, because these, much like the “buttressing your denial” ad hoc argument in Freudian psychoanalysis, are merely put in place to prevent an assertion (in this case, psychological egoism) from being falsified. I’m also leaving self-interest at the purely genetic level out of the equation, simply because genes can’t conceive of their self-interest, so it’s meaningless to disqualify altruism as being altruism on the basis of kin-selection instinct and subsequent evolutionary success.

This may step all over some people’s deeply held philosophical traditions. Reducing some to less than universal (i.e. the primacy of self-interest in human nature) and rendering others less magical (i.e. altruism doesn’t seem so dependent on salvation from our own nature, lowering the bar for what constitutes altruism), but I think it does render the terms more usable in rational discussion.

Further to this, I’d like to say that I don’t think that altruism is automatically ethical. Doing great harm to yourself in order to bring about a minimal improvement in the quality of life of another, when they don’t need it, is not something I’d call ethical. It’s increasing the suffering in the world.

Now that I’ve got my terms out of the way, on to what I wanted to say.

Something that really gets on my nerves, is the practitioner of ad hoc altruism. The person who consciously goes into a venture with their own interests in mind, and while perhaps even of kind demeanour, goes about said venture in a particularly craven and underhanded manner. All the time having an explicit egoist agenda (“I want X so I can get Y for myself”, and so on), but redefining themselves as a paragon of altruistic virtue.

Given my lowering of the bar for what constitutes altruism, at least at the expense of the magical kind, you may be forgiven for thinking that I’m lax about the issue. I’m not. When egoists pretend that their egocentric antics are altruistic, it cheapens altruism and altruists.

Why do these egoists try it? In the context that I’m talking about, specifically the ad hoc restating of egoist intentions as altruistic, it’s usually because the success criteria of an egocentric venture have not been met. That is to say, the failed attempt to serve one’s self can look like less of a failure when it is re-framed as altruism.

For those not of union sensibilities, you will have to bear with me because this is the best archetype I can come up with: Failed scabs.

For those not up with (dated?) union lingo, the scab is the employee that undermines union members with the intent of advancing their own career. They don’t pay a union fee, yet they are happy to accept the pay raises brought about through the payment of their co-workers union fees. They will suck up to a bad employer, and enable said employer in treating their workforce badly, all to gain the grace of the bad employer.

You get the idea. Advancement for one’s self at the expense of others.

It’s when these types of scabs fail to receive any benefit from their egoism, indeed when they fail badly, that they are most likely to re-invent themselves as altruists. After all, if they enabled and disgraced themselves to get ahead, and they don’t get ahead, it’s just got to suck to be them.

Suddenly, in the case of the failed scab, not paying a union fee is all about championing freedom of association for the workers. Even if the workers already had it. Enabling a bad employer to treat the staff like rubbish, is discipline in keeping the machine working well. Even if the team already works efficiently, often more-so than the scab.

Accepting less pay or more hours for the same pay, just to keep their own job for which they aren’t the most skilled candidate anyway (and scabs usually aren’t), becomes doing what’s good for the company which in turn is good for the workers! Even when the company can afford to pay more for better labour.

Sometimes accepting less pay or more hours for the same pay, is to help the recipients of the company’s services. Which appears especially credible in emotional terms if the recipients are disadvantaged or vulnerable, but isn’t credible in reasoned terms. Paying less for second-rate labour isn’t always in the best interest of the end recipient, especially if the service provider is profiteering – which if you are talking about a vulnerable end recipient, usually offends the union members to no end.

I spent my earlier pro-union years in the company of unionists from nursing and ambulance backgrounds. Self-interested types were the cause of so many complaints.

The successful egoists would provide frustration, usually gaining career advancement and ultimately never having to pretend to altruism. The failed egoists would provide light relief by way of Schadenfreude as they flailed to pretend moral superiority.

Attendant to both their egoism and their delusions of moral superiority were the empirical manifestations of their own entitlement biases.

There always seemed a host of these.

Driving like they owned the road with complete contempt for others. Queue jumping and pushing in (especially around food anecdote seemed to put them down as greediest pig at the trough). Sexual entitlement bias sometimes presenting as the less amusing quirk of sexual harassment, sometimes with an attendant attitude of entitlement that sees them expecting their rationalisations and sexual self-pity to be listened to by others, as if others had any obligation.

This last acting out of entitlement is probably the most comical when redressed as altruism. “I’m a good, giving, sensitive, lover with so much to offer, so when am I going to get what I deserve? I need to be more selfish!” – I’m paraphrasing something I’ve seen first hand more than once, and by account more than once*, and all up, several times in relation to notorious anti-unionists. Given that the cause for their malady in the first case is some kind of sexual misconduct, the claim to need to be more selfish is astounding.

It’s always amusing to see greedy people who seem to think that the cause of their woes is that they aren’t greedy enough.

I’ve been told by people in the know that this kind of sexual entitlement bias is prevalent in the profile of sex offenders as well.

When the failed egoist sees something they want, they make a not-too-subtle bee-line for it. Which is perhaps why they fail, more successful egoists being able to play their cards closer to their chests, and thus never having to go through the ad hoc gymnastics to save their ego a bruising, or indeed, to save their career relationships. All while the lumbering, obviousness of the lesser egoist being what brings them unstuck in the first place.

The confident, crypto-egoist is far more likely to not stir up their fellow workers, perhaps appearing more fair and likeable than their bumbling and predictable counterparts. While the selfish jerk with the poor people skills and lousy team-spirit, won’t garner respect. Indeed, from observation, they don’t seem to do too well in the eyes of their bosses either.

Of all the tales I’ve been told of these types, none of them have lasted. They’ve all left and they’ve all left under a cloud. Maybe it’s a product of the narrative I’m being told (being told by collectivists rather than dog-eat-dog types), but then, none of my own observations have seen deviation from this state of affairs either.

There’s one case that sticks in my mind from the late 1990s.

There was a guy, a non-union member. He didn’t go in for collective bargaining and pretended that he was some paragon of virtue for resisting a culture of coercion – when the workplace was a kind, caring one that only had a high union concentration because the particular union was an especially good one (one of the small ones, not a super-union).

He’d accept pay-rises negotiated by the union, while he’d decry the process to try to butter up the boss. (The boss saw through it as well as anyone else.)

Some virtuous excuse could be found for when he flipped out and threw furniture at other workers, or at least a certain amount of blame shifting. When he sexually harassed the daughter of one of his peers (albeit off the job), all the gymnastics were deployed – it was good for her, he was helping her out, he was getting recompense, etc.

He was a jerk on the road, treating other drivers like they were in his territory. He was often over-eager to help himself to communal resources, at the expense of others.

Eventually, being an intolerable pain in the backside, burdening his co-workers with all kinds of crap, and not being particularly good at his job in the first place, he was fired.

A friend of mine who worked at the union for his workplace told me all about his phone call to the union. It was the tale of a poor persecuted altruist, who somehow managed in this apparent spirit of altruism, with a history of anti-unionism, to convince himself that he was entitled to the union representation he had for years so pointedly avoided paying for.

In the end, after being told repeatedly that he wasn’t entitled, that the union couldn’t help him, he asked “well what can you do?” To which my friend told him that he could give him one piece of advice, before popping The Cruel Sea’s Three Legged Dog into his CD Player and sending “Better Get A Lawyer” down the phone line. Which is how the phone call ended.

If this guy played according to form, he would have gone on to tell himself and all who were unfortunate to have given him attention, how the union and everyone else, being of lesser moral competence, had overlooked and under-appreciated his altruism. All despite being the most selfish prick in the workplace from the outset.

Selfish with people’s time. Selfish with people’s money. Selfish with communal resources (such as coffee paid for by employees). Selfish with the sexual liberty of a co-worker’s daughter. Selfish with the labour of others and even the patience and grace of the employer he sucked up to, the employer that quite fairly only asked that he just do a good job.

In return he gave abuse and sub-standard labour.

That’s hardly indicative of an altruistic outlook. It’s an egoist outlook, and ultimately by egoistic standards, he failed. He failed to get for himself what he set out to, at least career wise. His career and his sexual propositions were rejected. All he really got out of it all in the long run was a bit more of the communal coffee than he was entitled to.

So failing that, he pretended to be an altruist. He lost a lot which was undeniable, so he had to pretend that it was with the intent of the benefit of others.

How cheap would altruism be if this guy qualified as an altruist? Can you see why ad hoc altruism gets up my nose? You have to pity the dog that dies to save a child for being compared to this kind of amorality.

~ Bruce

* And by “account”, I mean successfully resolved workplace sexual harassment complaints.

I guess you have to expect that with influence, and philosopher is going to have their ideas misused, abused and cited superficially. I’m getting used to the way Popper has received this legacy.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins recounted the tale of an “overzealous Popperian” who claimed that evolution wasn’t science because it wasn’t falsifiable. The rather obvious response being that there are fossil-strata combinations that would obliterate the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution. In fact the Cartesian product of fossilised species and available geological strata yield a very large number of impossible evolutionary scenarios – hominid remains in Jurassic strata would be one of many Darwinian evolution-killers.

All one has to do is dig up one of these finds to have a complete falsification of Darwinian evolution. It’s falsifiable, hence it’s science.

Chris Uhlmann of the ABC’s 7:30 Report has come in to bat for the climate change denialists (and I use the word quite deliberately – denialists – more on that later), in an op-ed called In praise of the sceptics. He cites Popperian falsifiability as the hallmark of science, all in an attempt to make the allegation, just like Dawkins’ “overzealous Popperian”, that the science of climate change isn’t falsifiable.

I think it worth going further into the modus operandi of the climate change deniers, and faux-falsificationists in general, before getting back to Uhlmann. That and I’ve been dwelling on this for a while and I want to indulge myself.

A brief rescue of falsificationism

There is a misappropriation of Popperian falsificationism that I think has fuelled denialists of various types, and indeed given ammunition or at least cause for false concern to many critical of Popper. Specifically, it’s this notion I’ve seen doing the rounds that if an anomaly is found in exception to a theory, then the theory is chucked out the window and the scientific establishment shouldn’t or even can’t have anything to do with it.

This is specifically evident in holocaust denialism, Darwinian-evolutionary denialism (see the Ted Steele saga), UFOlogy (anomalies in government accounts) and other quaint ideas. Including climate change denialism.

The angle is that once science is supposed to abandon the standard model, the quaint fringe theory naturally falls into place by fiat, so often it being claimed that the fringe theory would be standard if not for the conspiracy of a dogmatic orthodoxy.

But take the relatively un-contentious scientific transition from Newtonian gravity to Einsteinian gravity.

Due to the local warping of space-time close to a massive object like the sun, and the fact that Newtonian physics doesn’t account for it, an Einsteinian account will give a more accurate prediction of the orbit of Mercury. Prior to this realisation, the discrepancy between the observed orbit of Mercury and the orbit predicted by Newtonian physics was chalked up to a possible planet in orbit closer to the Sun (a hypothetical planet dubbed “Vulcan”). A planet that was never found.

Clearly it’s the case that when making predictions about the orbit of Mercury, Einstein’s approach is best. Put in Popperian terms, Newtonian gravity has been falsified. But has science washed its hands of the Newtonian altogether? No. No it hasn’t.

Not every observed object in the night sky is subject to relativistic velocities or space that is as locally warped as much or more than that around Mercury. When the less exotic conditions are met, the predictions made by Newtonian physics fall into line with Einsteinian predictions. In these contexts, Newton’s gravity can explain with much the same explanatory power.

But why ever bother with Newton at all? Well for one, it can take a lot more (and I mean a lot – several more orders of magnitude) computer power to resolve Einsteinian predictions, and there isn’t enough computational power available for all astronomical calculations to be done ala Einstein. So if you are going to make a prediction about something out there in space, and you know that the context is amenable to Newtonian calculations such that the difference is significantly lower than the margin of error, then you can go about doing your number crunching Newton-style and save a few gigaflops.

It would however, be meaningless and frankly stupid, to call this the dogmatism of a Newtonian orthodoxy. But if you were consistent, and you were towing the line of the faux-Popperian climate change denialist, this is the kind of accusation you would have to make.

A lot of the mathematical and methodological short-cuts made in climatology are like this – for other practical reasons if not always algorithmic complexity and subsequent computational power. They may not be universally true, but in the context of the data being assessed, they are as reliable as more demanding methods. Much like Newtonian calculations in a low-speed, low-mass context.

Sometimes it’s the case that the (often non-climatologist) climate change denialist just doesn’t realise the accuracy and utility of the mathematics or method used in the relevant climatological context. Which is perhaps why some don’t extend the same courtesy to climatologists as they do to astronomers who still use Newton, when they come across what they consider to be unusable fudge-factors.

And herein lies some of the confusion about what Popper was on about.

Popper argued the falsifiability of an idea essential to its status as scientific – this is un-contentious. But he didn’t state rejection of a falsified idea as necessary to its scientific status. A falsified hypothesis, rejected or not, being falsifiable (obviously) is still a scientific hypothesis. Newtonian gravity, as falsified as it is, is still a scientific hypothesis.

A complaint raised against Popper by sincere philosophers of science, and skeptics and the sort, is that science is anomaly laden. It’s been argued that no system of knowledge could withstand having its underlying scientific assumptions knocked out upon falsification – what would happen to medicine if the basic assumptions of chemistry were falsified?

Pseudo-skeptics have come at it from the other angle – find an anomaly and you’ve just knocked over your opponents entire orthodoxy. (Sometimes subsequently asking for “equal time” for their ideas at the ABC, no less.)

But this is all just hyperventilation. Falsificationism isn’t nearly as epistemologically excoriating as they make out.

There are additional criteria that Popper discussed, such as explanatory power, competing hypothesis and so on, that deal with what is to be done with a scientific hypothesis once falsifying observations have been made. To be brief (otherwise I’d have to quote slabs of text)…

“It may now be possible for us to answer the question: How and why do we accept one theory in preference to others?

…We choose the theory that best holds its own in competition with other theories; the one which, by natural selection, proves itself the fittest to survive. This will be the one which not only has hitherto stood up to the severest tests, but the one which is also testable in the most rigorous way. A theory is a tool which we test by applying it, and we judge as to its fitness by the results of its applications.”

(Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, pg. 91, 1959)

There are perhaps not immediately obvious implications to this reasoning.

What if you have two or more competing theories, each surviving for the time being in an environment of equal rigor? What if you only have one theory, and it’s already found fault?

As to the former, given the Popper quote, you may share my confusion as to why Barry Brook seems to think a multiple hypothesis approach is at odds with Popperian falsificationism (calling Plimer’s modus operandi falsificationist to boot – arggghh!!! – overzealous Popperian maybe!) Popper is all about multiple competing hypothesis, and I’m not sure how Brook’s linked to text would violate Popper’s considerations on the evasion of falsification (such as ad hoc equivocation).

As to the latter question, well obviously if you have only one theory, it’s going to be the best to stand up to rigor even if it fares poorly. There’s no competition!

One can therefore deduce from this that the mere existence of anomalies is not fatal to the decision to accept a theory. Not that excoriating. A theory just has to survive the acid test better than other theories, it doesn’t have to go unscathed.

And clearly, what you don’t have to do is chuck out a theory just because some outsider to science, with delusions of heretic status, points to a perceived anomaly. Much less again do you have to chuck out a theory if the perceived anomaly is the product of a misunderstanding of method, or the product of forged data like that found in The Great Global Warming Swindle.

Now that I’ve got that out of my system…

Back to Chris Uhlmann

I think Uhlmann’s right about a few things. On Popper on Einstein, Marx and Freud, I suspect I’m of similar mind to Uhlmann, although I suspect there would be difference in the nuance. And I’m not so credulous on Popper on Hegel – I wonder how Popperian Uhlmann would be then. But I digress…

After giving people I think a not-incompetent brief on Popper, Uhlmann dives headlong into the other overzealous faux-Popperian trope – if it’s not the exaggeration of anomalies, it’s the pretence that your opponent is pushing an unfalsifiable intellectual product, when in fact that’s not the case. Like the mentioned heckler Dawkins raised in The God Delusion.

And how does Uhlmann back up this assertion?

“So Popper would argue that to say any theory is “settled” means that you are not talking about science but pseudo-science.

By now it should be clear that I am building towards an act of heresy. In mainstream political and scientific debate today what held true for Einstein does not hold true for climate science. Climate science we are endlessly told is “settled”.”

(Chris Uhlmann, 2009)

Forgive my use of invective, but I’m going to give this notion precisely the respect it properly deserves. This assertion – it’s deeply and profoundly stupid. Not fit for publication at the ABC stupid. Misleadingly stupid. Obviously stupid.

And if you can’t see how obviously stupid it is now, you’ll smack your head after I tell you why.

So, the scientific debate is endlessly telling people it’s settled, eh? For that to be true, the IPCC who represent the bulk of the research being done (and let me emphasise – being done), would have to have made some kind of inference that it’s all over red-rover, mission accomplished.

To paraphrase a comedian, “if science thought it knew everything, science would stop.” Ongoing research is predicated on the assumption that there is more to be said on a topic. From the last IPCC report, we were told with 90% confidence that there was human induced climate change. 90% up from 66% in the previous report. 90%, not 95% or 99%. 90% being the minimum conventional level of confidence seen as indicating a serious probability of a scientific hypothesis being correct, short of the higher confidence levels that the IPCC is aiming for in future.

The IPCC says it’s settled? Pish. If it did, it’d be able to pack up shop, which is far from what’s happened.

The most current report still doesn’t even factor in the ice dynamic effect for ice-sheet contributions to sea-level rise. Why? Because the IPCC can’t say with sufficient confidence that any of the predictions coming from ice dynamic effect models are supported. And we are supposed to believe this is the IPCC telling us that the matter is settled.

Go and have a look at the fourth assessment report if you don’t believe me. Even the predictions for sea level change based predominantly on thermal expansion, make a wide range of predictions. And this is the IPCC telling us that the matter is settled? Don’t make me laugh. (Actually do make me laugh – I’m enjoying a rare moment of Schadenfreude.)

If the IPCC thought any of these matters were settled, the IPCC would have stopped researching them. It hasn’t and it’s reported accordingly. It hasn’t told us that the matter is settled, at least not in any manner that would equate to the level of dogmatism displayed by Lord Kelvin, with whom Uhlmann draws comparison. The IPCC hasn’t told us anything that should lead us to conclude that their theory is unfalsifiable, or their reporting or adherence to models, dogmatic.

Uhlmann is flatly wrong. And in doing so furthers the public misunderstanding of Popper just one little bit further.

But the rubbish, it continues.

“But to make the, perfectly reasonable, point that science is never settled risks being branded a “sceptic” or worse a “denier”.”

(Chris Uhlmann, 2009)

Cry me a river. “Branded a “sceptic”". Oh the agony. Really though, what’s so bad about that?

One of the panel following the ABC’s airing of The Great Global Warming Swindle (the poor fellow who had to answer that Carbon-14 guy in the audience) labelled himself a “sceptic”, and he believes in the theory of man-made climate change. The agony.

My name is Bruce! I make the point that science is never settled! AND I’M A SKEPTIC!!! (My preferred spelling, hence I’ll identify as such and spell it that way from here-on.)

Nope. I still don’t feel like I’m bleeding on a cross here. Still comfortable being called a skeptic.

Being a skeptic is a matter of epistemic virtue. It’s why so many self-styled climate change denialists themselves self-identify (wrongly) as skeptics. It’s hardly the stigma Uhlmann makes it out to be.

Sadly, Uhlmann doesn’t seem to get the denial thing either.

Consider the two following positions.

• “Based on the evidence, I have no belief in man-made climate change.”
• “Based on the evidence, I have a belief in no man-made climate change.”

The first has no belief. This is skepticism and it reflects the position of an actual skeptic, Michael Shermer, during his days prior to the acceptance of man-made climate change.

The second has a belief. It isn’t skepticism. It’s a denial. And it’s because they take this position that the denialists are called denialists. They deny!

My name is Bruce! And I deny Young Earth Creationism! I’m a Young Earth Creationism denialist!

Nope. I still don’t feel like I’m bleeding on the cross.

The embarrassment comes in when someone predicates their belief, their denial, upon bad evidence. Claiming that you deny the moon landing hoax conspiracy theory because the easily available evidence falsifies it, doesn’t carry the stigma of denying climate change on the basis of doctored or fabricated data, or the misinterpretation of existing, legitimate data.

Denial involves belief, not skepticism and it only looks silly when you believe silly things. You can’t reasonably allege that a critic is conspiring to silence silly ideas, just because they point out that said silly ideas are silly.

And with after conspiracy-minded pap, Uhlmann conveniently brings us back to a quotation of Popper on the interpretation of evidence to fit preconceived theories, with his closing passage “And here’s a final thought from Popper about the dangers of being too “credulous”…”

Well I’ve got a Popper quote for Uhlmann.

“We see here clearly that not all consequences of our actions are intended consequences; and accordingly, that the conspiracy theory of society cannot be true because it amounts to the assertion that all results, even those which at first sight do not seem to be intended by anybody, are the intended results of the actions of people who are interested in these results.”

(Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies, ‘The Autonomy of Sociology’,  1945)

Uhlmann would do well to be less credulous to the conspiracy theory of the politics of climate change, and its assertion that the criticism of denial is intended as means to silence self-styled heretics.

~ Bruce

I’ve been watching the countdown for a month now and this is what I get!

The clock has hit zero and it’s still offering the beta version of 9.10 for those that “can’t wait”. A time-zone glitch, I guess.

Oh well. At least they didn’t offer one of those spiffy launch parties that Windows 7 had. If they had, and they’d backed out on that, then I’d be really disappointed.

~ Bruce

And I guess I’m at risk of repeating a kind of stale critique of my own, if I keep banging on about this kind of thing. To the point of tedium, perhaps?

If I do sound like a broken record, please consider that it’s because I’m describing the track from a broken record that keeps getting far too much air time. Please, defenders of the faith, apologists, get some new material!

Bert Archer, writing for The Star, notes that Richard Holloway is in Toronto for the International Festival of Authors, touting him as a friendly kind of atheist. To me, this is a funny kind of assertion, as Holloway has always struck me as about as atheistic as John Shelby Spong – which is somewhat of an best-guess approximation more than a discrete category. Holloway self-identifies an “expectant agnostic”, which to me speaks of a kind of soft theism, or deism.

Of course, the thing about Holloway “preaching a kinder atheism”, is that it differentiates him from those nasty “neo-atheists” – another group of writers whose self-identification seems to get the hard and fast treatment. Oddly enough, Holloway, from the looks of Archer’s piece, didn’t have anything to say about “neo-atheists”, and much less about Dawkins than what Archer seemed to conclude.

Take this old, oft-repeated track.

“…it’s a Scot named Richard Holloway who reminds us that the certainty of neo-atheism has a lot in common with the certainty of religion.”

(Bert Archer, 2009)

Certainty! Neo-atheism! Two things Holloway apparently didn’t have anything to say about in his interview. Perhaps he did, and maybe we’d have read about it if only Archer would have stopped persecuting the same old line and let more of the article be about what Holloway was doing in Toronto – was his visit in any way related to those strident Hitchenses and Dawkinses?

At any rate, broken records, in addition to being repetitive, are also predictable. Especially if you heard the broken track (tract?) being played over and over.

This is the part of the broken record that seems to be almost uniform across the genre of broken religious apologetics records – you hear “Certainty!” Then someone asks “What certainty? Do you have an example, a quote?” From that point, you get a repetition of the part of the record that plays cicadas chirping, tumbleweeds tumbling and the sound of the wind whistling, sometimes through the apologist’s ears.

If you are going to level an accusation against a group of intellectuals, it really helps to have done two things.

One, to actually collect some evidence. Archer needs to tell us how the “neo-atheists” are acting on certitude. Bare assertion is not enough. Two, to have checked for counter-evidence. Try to falsify your claim before letting someone else do it for you, making you look a bit silly in the process.

Naturally, I’m only too happy to make Archer look silly.

First cab of the rank is Richard Dawkins. Dawkins has now his famous 1-7 scale (you have read The God Delusion haven’t you Archer?), where 1 is certitude in your belief in God and 7 is certitude in your belief that God doesn’t exist. Dawkins calls himself a 6.5, saying in interviews (and I paraphrase) that “it’s never a good thing for a scientist to be certain about anything.”

And then there’s Christopher Hitchens, whom Archer brands the same way. Let me explain by way of comparison.

Victor Stenger, author of God: The Failed Hypothesis, claims that traditional gods, those anthropomorphic, interventionist deities are constructed in a way that makes testable claims about the world. The God of the 6000 year old Universe can be tested against the fossil record, amongst other things. Stenger (in God: The Failed Hypothesis), claims that these gods have been falsified by what we already know about the world – “beyond reasonable doubt”, to use his own words from The New Atheism.

This isn’t even that contentious when you consider that many, many Christians have moved away from older God hypotheses for pretty much the same reasons. There’s no point in calling Stenger a certain neo-atheist if what he’s doing (falsifying older God hypotheses) is so similar to what has already been practised by many moderate Christians, or even a less moderate Vatican. It’s empty rhetoric.

Stenger has more recently turned his gaze towards the gods of moderates, especially those taking refuge in quantum theory, which considering that Stenger is a physicist (amongst other things), is not too dissimilar from a geologist or evolutionary biologist pondering the 6000 year old God – even a mainstream Christian geologist or evolutionary biologist.

There are however, still some further epistemic limits to Stenger’s criticisms. His position on deist gods (which in Quantum Gods and The New Atheism, he distinguishes from traditional gods), is that some of them do elude scientific analysis. This isn’t what certainty looks like.

Back to Hitchens. Keeping in mind that Hitchens published a section of Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis in his The Portable Atheist anthology, in response to Tony Jones at the recent Festival of Dangerous Ideas at the Sydney Opera House, Hitchens criticised Stenger’s stance on the question of God’s existence as being over-confident.

How can certainty be less than certain? If Hitchens can take this position relative to Stenger, how then in the absence of evidence to support Archer’s allegation, are we to accept a charge of certitude? I’d say that if you were being honest, you couldn’t. The same goes for the allegation as levelled against Dawkins, and other un-named “neo-atheists”.

And again, what has this got to do with Holloway’s visit to Toronto? It seems to me that Archer has just used the man’s visit, reputation and accessibility as a means to push an oft-repeated, never substantiated and entirely unoriginal piece of posturing that’s been doing the rounds for the last three years.

If it looks like a duck. If it quacks like a duck, then it’s probably a duck. An opportunistic, apparently plagiarizing, holier-than-thou duck.

When Holloway gets a word in, and it’s actually tangentially on the topic that Archer has chosen to write about, this is what he has to say.

“If you’re a crusading rationalist, if you think rationality is the ultimate good, therefore, that might make you a missionary. I think Richard Dawkins is a missionary for rationalism. I think that we’re much more complicated than that. I think that we have a level of rationality, but there are dark, brooding things under us as well.”

(Richard Holloway in interview with Bert Archer, 2009)

Which is to say that Holloway has a point of difference with Dawkins. This doesn’t add to what Archer has already said about “neo-atheists”, and it doesn’t follow from this as Archer infers, that Dawkins et. al. “chuck the stuff [they] doesn’t understand”, nor that somehow having “no particular compunction to figure everything out”, is virtuous. Indeed, please do tell me how scientific or moral enquiry are a bad thing!

I think it worth mentioning though, that I believe Holloway is deeply wrong on this point. Having a rational world view is in no way prejudiced against the realisation that humans are complicated and not entirely rational. Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, while advocating reason, also recognised the passions of the human mind – something that Holloway should be familiar with, being by a Scot. Indeed, I think Holloway’s Godless Morality could be improved with the inclusion of some of Hume’s observations.

In the more contemporary setting, viewing Dawkins’ proselytism for reason being at odds with the realisation of human nature is frankly absurd. Other primates don’t have the faculty for abstract thought that we do, although they share some of the passions. As an ethologist, Dawkins is forced to view such animal behaviour through a rational discipline, but it doesn’t stop him from making observations about the less reasoned behaviour of apes. Indeed, get Dawkins talking about gorillas, especially rights for gorillas, and you’ll get rational discussion without discounting emotion, galore.

Further to this, from an evolutionary perspective, the observation of instinct is part and parcel of Dawkins’ main contributions to science. Such as the way the observation of kin-selection and altruistic behaviours arose from the genecentric view espoused in The Selfish Gene. Taken to its logical conclusion, this extends to the evolutionary psychology of the human mind and the work of the likes of Stephen Pinker, wherein all sorts of emotional, irrational behaviours are observed in rational contexts.

Neither reason, nor the valuing of reason, lead to a prejudiced appreciation of human nature. It’s not like Dawkins or Pinker (or Dennett or any of the others who are usually pilloried with this false criticism) are arguing for reason to the complete expense of human experience.

Indeed, Peter Singer’s brand of preference utilitarianism, with his recognition of a Darwinian perspective on human nature (which informs human preference), recognises human passions, urges, emotional needs and desires. And in recognising these aspects of human nature, it is a moral system that Dawkins has praised as “logically self-consistent”. (Check the unedited interview between Singer and Dawkins from The Genius of Charles Darwin if you want to see some of the very interesting, and worthy discussion I’m citing – but at 43 minutes of HD YouTube goodness, you’d better be ready with some bandwidth).

While not accusing Holloway of a false allegation of scientism, (of which I am also oh-so-tired of hearing), I think Victor Stenger’s response to the allegation in The New Atheism, contains a response to Holloway’s point of contention, and more so Archer’s use of it.

“The atheist view is not what some believers derogatorily call “scientism,” the view that science is the only source of knowledge. Atheists appreciate the beauty of art, music and poetry as much as believers, along with the joys of love, friendship, parenthood, and other human relationships.”

(The New Atheism: Taking a Stand for Science and Reason, Victor Stenger, 2009)

Or for more appreciation of irrational and counter-intuitive human nature from a rational, Darwinian perspective, one could just direct Holloway and Archer to Dawkins’ ‘Atheists for Jesus‘ essay (for which a discussion between Holloway and Dawkins was inspiration), featured in Hitchens’ The Portable Atheist, right smack-bang before Stenger’s contribution. I’m glad Holloway prefaced his comment about Dawkins with an “if”, and I’d invite him to re-evaluate it.

Really, I don’t think that there’s as much at odds between Dawkins, his ilk, and the likes of Holloway, than Archer makes out. Archer’s take, if not the worst example out there, smacks of re-hashed, unexamined, baseless posturing and frankly, it gets in the way of someone I’d rather be paying attention to (Holloway).

~ Bruce

(HT: Thanks to Martin for the heads-up on the article. You can follow him on Twitter here, or at his blog here. Time to add him to my blog-roll like I promised to do last Friday. Now I’ve just got to finish reading Godless Morality for the third time, and then I can write a review I think I’ve promised.)

…on Friday the 30th of October. So much on my plate at the moment. Fhew.

I think I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not a good idea to try and put an effort into forcing out a blog post at the expense of what little down time you have. I could, but I won’t.

~ Bruce